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The Problem Isn’t Civil Disobedience, It’s Civil Obedience

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
MAY 21

Our society does not have an antisemitism crisis. It doesn’t have a crisis of far left radicalism, Islamist extremism, support for terrorism, or fomenting of dissent by foreign powers.

Our society has a moral crisis. A cruelty crisis. An imperialism crisis. A militarism crisis. A propaganda crisis. An insincerity crisis. A stupidity crisis. An obedience crisis.

Empire managers and imperial spinmeisters try to pretend there’s some horrifying existential emergency involving hatred of Jews or love of Hamas or some other ridiculous nonsense in our society, because the empire too is in a state of crisis. People are waking up from its lullaby of propaganda and are rejecting its narrative manipulation like never before, which is why instead of relenting and accepting the empire’s destruction of Gaza, opposition to it is only growing stronger.

So the authorized custodians of imperial narratives flail around desperately trying to regain some control by spinning all the civil disobedience we are seeing in a way that makes it seem like some sort of problem which needs to be fixed. But as Howard Zinn said, “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.”

Our problem is not that more and more people are opposing Israel’s empire-backed atrocities in Gaza with more and more aggression, our problem is that people are not opposing it aggressively enough. Our problem is that too many people still have their minds jacked into the mainstream worldview and ignore the most urgent matter of our time, letting their thoughts be preoccupied with frivolous garbage and trusting that our leaders are doing what’s best for us.

Mainstream culture is so shallow, vapid and idiotic that when an artist rapped about this issue of unparalleled urgency, he included the line “I want a ceasefire, fuck a response from Drake” — and everyone knew what he meant. He meant mainstream culture is fixated on phony public spats between millionaire pop stars while the US empire funnels weapons of annihilation into Israel to be dropped on a giant concentration camp full of children. It says so much about this fraudulent dystopia we live in that such a thing would need to be said. But it did.

The problem isn’t that people are becoming too disobedient, the problem is that people remain too obedient. The problem isn’t that people are becoming too radicalized against their government, the problem is that people aren’t radicalized enough. The problem is that the freaks who rule over us are not sufficiently afraid of us. The problem is that we have not yet come to the collective realization that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that we don’t actually need to put up with them doing crazy and evil things right in front of our faces.

Instead people sit around drooling with their eyes fixed on screens full of endless diversion while children are ripped to shreds by western-supplied military explosives for no other reason than because they happen to belong to the wrong ethnic group. 

That is the real crisis of our society. Not an imaginary antisemitism epidemic. Not college kids disobeying authority figures. Not leftists. Not anarchists. Not Islam. Not Hamas.

The real crisis in our society is that too many people are still blindly obedient to a murderous and tyrannical empire which should be hacked to pieces and scattered to the winds.

____________________________________________________________________

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Featured image via Joe Piette (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)

Letter to the Editor – Leif LeBaron

Oakley Rankin’s “Letter on EMI” last week states: “[…] most of us are using portable devices which cannot be cabled.”

Many people seem to be similarly mistaken, but wireless devices (be they Android or Apple) can indeed be connected by cable. To be clear, one can disable wi-fi and alternatively connect to the Internet or another wi-fi device (television, printer, &c.) by cable, using an adapter. It’s worth noting that cables also provide superior speed, reliability, and security.

Many variations of small, inexpensive, “dongle” adapters are available. Some just have one port, but there are multi-function models which provide many ports (Ethernet, HDMI, USB, charging, &c.), all in a compact case with a short cable. Just be sure your device is compatible and matches the connector (usually USB-C these days, but even Apple’s obsolete proprietary connector is available).

Oakley’s letter also states: “I know that EMI is very real and have tasted its effects.”, yet it begins by dismissively conflating EMI with psychosomatic illness and “bogus diagnoses”. Again, I think many share such an opinion, which is not surprising, considering the emphatic assurance of safety & efficacy from government & industry, and the lack of personal enquiry.

Suffice it to say: In contradiction to the status quo, a large body of evidence exists, there to be seen, by those who choose to look, To quote Oakley’s letter once more: “Ask your children and grandchildren how this would sit with them!”

The Lamentable Rise of Book Banning in Canada

Many Canadians have heard of the scandal back in September involving the Peel District School Board (PDSB) decision to remove books published before 2008 from school libraries.

 

What made this particularly shocking was the immense scope: one book-loving Erindale Secondary School student told the CBC that over half the collection in the school’s library was removed.

 

Canadians across the country were also baffled by the arbitrary cut-off date of 2008 – which meant the throwing out of all 19th and 20th century literary classics, but also popular recent series like Harry Potter and the Hunger Games!

 

This surreal incident is part of a larger trend of censoring books deemed offensive or outdated.

 

In British Columbia, the Surrey school district has removed Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men from the recommended reading list – teachers in this district wishing to teach these two literary classics will need special permission from a principal.

 

To Kill a Mockingbird is guilty of being a “white saviour trope”, and Of Mice and Men contains “ableist language”.

 

The Toronto Catholic school board recently passed a policy banning the assigning of books containing racial slurs against black people – with a small carveout for books written by black authors.

 

This ban includes such timeless classics as To Kill A Mockingbird (published in 1960), Lord Of The Flies (1954), Gone With The Wind (1936), Heart Of Darkness (1899), Of Mice And Men (1937), and The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

 

These classics have never been out of print because reviewers and readers alike have long been entranced by their timeless stories of love and betrayal, suffering and joy, war, and peace.

 

To be sure, the authors conveyed their own distinctive view of the world and human nature using the language of their time period.

 

If you rewatch old episodes of the TV series Cheers, the jokes and phrasing will make you feel like you are looking in on another world entirely.

 

This is because, in effect, you are. As L.P. Hartley wrote in his 1953 novel The Go-Between (has that one been banned yet?): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”.

 

Cheers first ran in 1982. Should we really be surprised, then, if some of the phrasing in Gone With The Wind – published in 1936 – takes us aback in 2024?

 

In 2022, the Upper Canada District School Board (UCDSB) banned Agatha Christie’s famous mystery novel And Then There Were None from classrooms, apparently due to language denigrating a Jewish character.

 

At the time, a spokesperson for the UCDSB made this startling statement in defence of the ban: “The text was first published around 1939 and is no longer relevant or engaging to students”.

  

The spokesperson went on to say that the district works to ensure that it is “offering fresh, engaging, timely and relatable materials to students”.

 

Therein lies the underlying problem with the book banning craze: a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of some school boards of the role that schools should play in society.

 

Students have plenty of ability to find “fresh, engaging, timely and relatable materials” on TikTok and in conversations with their friends.

 

The role of schools is to provide students with interesting, edifying, and timeless material with which to challenge themselves.

 

Students do not have to agree with the books or essays they read in school, but in reading them they will gain the written and rhetorical skills needed to logically articulate their own positions.

 

Having read most of the literary classics currently on the chopping block, I can say with certainty that the occasional use of language now considered shocking or distasteful does not obscure their value or their message.

 

The policy of censorship employed by many school boards lacks historical nuance and charity, and deprives students of the joy of reading some of the best literature ever written.

 

Riley Donovan is a B.C. journalist and founder of the independent publication Dominion Review (dominionreview.ca). You can follow him on Twitter @valdombre

Muffin Maker

Clay Stories

A piece of pottery is not just a functional work of art, it’s a story.

It’s the lessons the potter sat through, experiments tried and failed and successes celebrated. It’s the time spent sitting at a wheel, mixing materials, washing the floors (again), and waiting for things to dry.

It’s the classical music playing in the background, the rolling chorus of bird cheeps, shrieks and hoots, the smell of fresh bread and flowers wafting through the window.

It’s a stray cat hair garnishing the clay right at the moment it dries, the meals eaten standing up (or forgotten entirely), the swears muttered and words uttered.

It’s the smiles and cheers and the searing heat of fire; of grainy textures and smooth glazes.

And it’s the moment you step into the studio and greet the potter. All of this is embedded into the clay.  

So it’s not merely a mug or a plate or a vase or a wall hanging, it’s a memory of a moment where your life intersected and entwined with the life of another human. Pottery is a useful and beautiful, tangible experience, and it’s the story of a lifetime.

The Denman Pottery Studio Tour is happening 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, May 18 and Sunday, May 19. There are nine potters participating at eight different studio locations around the island: Tom Dennis, Lilac Sun Pottery, Gordon Hutchens, Linda Adair, Sandra Shaffer, Raucous Raven Pottery, Ember Blair Hutchens, and Gilded Petunia Pottery.  

Visit denmanislandpotterystudiotour.com to learn more and to plan your adventure.

What stories will you hold in your hands?

Letter to the Editor – Sharon Small

The Comox Valley Record will be publishing the following long and short versions of my piece in their online and print versions respectively on how much the failed experiment is costing taxpayers.  Both CHEK and Global News covered the May 2 cancellations.  The Global News segment “DI steamed over cancellations,” highlights the extreme frustration of ferry users and includes Josie Osborne claiming “We need a long term solution….” in response to the BCF spokesperson claiming that the mechanical problems are being reduced.

            A Failed Cable Ferry Experiment Costs Taxpayers Millions 

Dear Editor:

For years B.C.Ferries attributed the persistent Baynes Sound cable ferry  mechanical breakdowns to teething problems. These teething problems, however, have become so chronic that union members and Denman and Hornby islanders refer to the world’s longest cable ferry as a failed experiment that needs  to be decommissioned. Recently released information from FOI requests confirm what islanders have suspected for almost a decade—that the world’s longest cable ferry costs taxpayers plenty to keep in iffy service.  

Although BCF’s ousted CEO claimed that the cable ferry would save taxpayer dollars on fuel and staffing and provide service on a par with conventional vessels, BCF accounts confirm that the cable ferry costs the same as conventional vessels for fuel and staffing—$2M annually; and according to one interpretation of BCF’s confusing records that call for an independent audit, the cost for maintenance and repairs run in the hundreds of million dollars annually. 

Despite the ferry’s unreliable service and the abyss between anticipated and actual expenses, BCF refuses to cut its losses by replacing it with a conventional vessel. The corporation’s stock excuse is that the current budget cycle doesn’t provide funds for replacement. Those who are mandated with providing corporate governance, the BCF Commissioner and the Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure, echo this sorry excuse for keeping a failed experiment in service.  

Since the budget provides funds for increasing deck space, however, BCF is considering spending $41M on stretching it.  Stretching a mechanically challenged, potentially unsafe, and slow vessel by installing heavier cables and a heavier engine is neither rational nor fiscally responsible. Islanders do not share BCF’s faith that should a cable fall off in winds higher than 39 knots, that it is safe to dock. Since the cable ferry currently runs at kayaking speed, due to dragging the weight of three mile-long cables and seaweed fouling the hull, adding extra weight should reduce speed even more. 

By placing budget considerations over reliability and cost-effectiveness, BCF continues to be in violation of the Coastal Ferry Act, BCF’s operational bible. The Coastal Ferry Act is unambiguous in mandating that the corporation provide assured service to ferry-dependent communities; and that government overseers steer the corporation towards improving service in a fiscally responsible and transparent manner.

The task of a CEO who is hired to turn around a dysfunctional corporation is to correct the failures of former CEOs, not to perpetuate them. Thus, islanders will continue to appeal to CEO Jimenez to reconsider keeping a failed experiment in costly service indefinitely. As Albert Einstein warns, to repeatedly do something in the same way but expect a different outcome is madness. 

Respectfully,

Sharon Small,

Denman Island Resident

Letter on EMI

Further to William Thomas’ article on CityWest’s system I will not labour the many misunderstandings  concerning Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) one can find on the web because there are a multitude of scientific studies on the effects of EMI, or ‘idiopathic environmental illness with attribution to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF)’ as it is known to the many scientists who have studied the effects on human beings.  If interested you could start with this article on the website Science Based Medicine:

“Electromagnetic hypersensitivity” and “wifi allergies”: Bogus diagnoses with tragic real world consequences

where you will find a summary of claims and actual scientific research and can follow links to many controlled studies on the health concerns of EMI.  And note in particular that the author never questions the pain sufferers claim is caused by EMI; he questions only the claim of causation.

What I will say however is my surprise in Thomas failing to mention that optical cable will actually effect a small reduction in overall EMI as it neither generates EMI or is interfered by EMI as is copper cable.  His reference, Jeromy Johnson, does not mention this fact directly but calls our attention to ‘converters’ which convert the electrical data signal to an optical one and back again.  Now the electrical signal has only to be converted to optical at source once, say in Prince Rupert or Vancouver, after which it simply needs amplifiers, not converters, along the course of the optical line to prevent the degradation of the signal which affects all types of signal propagation.  There will not be masses of converters on our road sides.  The signal will have to be converted back to electrical once it reaches it’s destination to be of use in our electrical devices.  This conversion will take place in the new modem.  Comparing CityWest’s Gigaspire Blast u6 to the Telus ActionTec T3200M that most of us on the island are already using I find that the power supplies—you know, that little black thing you plug into the wall outlet—are rated equally at 12vDC and 3 amps.  You can’t get out more power than you put in. The difference between the two is that the Blast u6 contains an optical to electrical converter and is connected directly to the network with an optical cable.  The T3200M has no converter and is connected to the network by a RJ11 copper wire plug.  Jeromy identifies the power supply as the culprit and states that an optical modem’s power supply ‘can generate high amounts of wide-spectrum EMI (electromagnetic interference)’.  But as we have seen, the power supply of the modem you already have is rated the same as the optical one you will get from CityWest.  Thus it is unclear where all Jeromy’s greatly increased EMI is coming from but if the power supply really did emit vastly increased EMI then your Telus modem has been doing so for years.

I know that EMI is very real and have tasted its effects.  When I was a kid in the late 1940’s I could be listening to Wayne and Schuster on the AM radio when a truck revved its engine outside our house.  The radio was immediately hit by a wave of EMI from the truck’s generator causing the two comedians to break up in a hail of static until the truck moved on.  I could discern no effect from it other than missing one of the duo’s jokes or distortion of Terry Dale’s mellifluous voice.  AM radio’s susceptibility to EMI is why today we mainly listen to FM.  It is another reason why our cars now have alternators rather than the generators of my youth.

And a final note.  We are urged to use a cable connection and have the CityWest technicians turn off WiFi permanently.  This at the very time most of us are using portable devices which cannot be cabled.  Ask your children and grandchildren how this would sit with them!  What a conundrum.

Oakley Rankin

I Became a Tribal Person

Sometimes I love a book so much I just get 10 copies of it to give as gifts to people. Richard Wagamese’s posthumous collection: “Selected: What comes from Spirit” is one of those books. So I hope Abraxas will have plenty of copies on hand for others as well. For some reason, which I irrationally attribute to left-handedness, I don’t always start a book at its beginning. I may open it randomly and just get a taste of it, may skip the introduction until I’m ready to read it, may peruse for photos. If it’s non-fiction, I may start at the end. This book is perfect for my style, as it is a gathering of the great Wagamese’s meditations, short essays, observations, reflections & insights. And they are presented in differing typeface and formats, intermingled with surprise pages of a differing colour. It is such a treasure I am purposefully savouring it like the proverbial box of chocolates, and not devouring the whole thing in a sitting. I am indulging slowly in the richness of his writing, all the better to appreciate the wisdom in his words. Like “The truth stays the same”. Hmmm, now there’s something to ponder. I am enjoying it in several ways, from opening it to scattered surprises to following each page as presented. This feels very much like a book that will stay on my bedside table, or maybe travel everywhere with me, for a good long while, like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Wherever you go, There you Are’, or Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the “Tao Te Ching”.

In his piece on Wood Ducks, Wagamese recounts his hidden observation from a tree, of the nest of a pair of wood ducks, his patient and deep immersion in the waiting process while the eggs hatched. He was living through an extremely difficult and unsettled time after his trapper family lost their home and livelihood through flooding for an Ontario dam, placement in foster care with no contact with his birth family, moving three times in a year, three different locales, three different schools. He had lost his mooring.

And yet, he writes:

“Some things in life remain. Some things transcend the losses and leavings of our living. I found the essence of my tribal self in that tree above the nest and it never left me. When the time was right, and I was ready, I emerged as a tribal person, as pure and natural as breathing.” In his unshakeable connection to the natural world and its cycles of renewal, Wagamese finds his home, his grounding.

Suffering teaches so many lessons; yet we can gain insight in a myriad of ways. Nothing is without cost. I often think we privileged ones carry the burden of too much. We are so surrounded by abundance that we come to expect it as our “right”. We are so safely tucked into our beds and our homes that we fail to expand our humanity to those who haven’t beds or homes. We look the other way and we don’t develop our compassion beyond caring for those closest to us. Speaking recently about the effects of Brexit with a Brit long-based in Vancouver, she said: “Well, we just couldn’t take any more immigrants; we have no more room.” And I asked her about the 13,000 acre estates of the gentry, and whether there might be some room there for housing, which the socialist in her conceded. What struck me was how we take the gross inequities of the world for granted, as if the ultra-rich actually are entitled to live as they do, on the backs of those who make their clothes in a sweat shop, build their high rises as “migrant labour” or clean their toilets. People blame those suffering the effects of climate crisis and disaster capitalism – primarily created by the wealthy industrialized nations – for wanting to live in safety and security. Close the borders, keep them out we shout, rather than addressing the causes that make them seek asylum in the first place.

Surely the angst of the current world climate – temperatures rising, forest fire evacuations happening in Fort Nelson right now, unprecedented storms and flooding not “just” in Bangladesh, but in California yet, together with the deep divisions and catastrophic death & destruction being caused by two unwinnable wars in the West, ought to be a time when we search for insight. What do we need to do differently for our common survival? How can we lessen our generalized anxiety?

To my view, one of the key things we need to do is recalibrate our thinking to decolonize our minds. We have to emerge/evolve as “tribal people” in a tribe that includes all of humanity. This is our tribe and we’d better get used to it. No one is secure until all are secure. We need to reexamine our scarcity mindset and find fairer, more equitable ways to live, love and work together as earthlings. This is our one & only home, and we need to share it. When we come to this realization, there comes to us a sense of calmness and belonging. But is it too late as some say? Is there time to do this justice work of recognition, reallocation and reconciliation? As a friend wisely told me recently, “We have all the time there is”.

Shucking Oysters: Contrary Trails

Shucking Oysters: Contrary Trails

By Alex Allen

Have you looked up at the sky lately? What do you see? It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s another plane, and another plane and another plane. The trails appear like giant zippers and spread out ominously. And then one can only hear the planes, as the sky is suddenly thick with cloud. I have been witnessing this for years, even more so, since I moved to Hornby over 25 years ago. People used to talk about it a lot. What happened to the conversation? What happened to so many conversations?

I’ll speak from personal experience. Every time I tell someone to look up, they do and then look back at me with a blank face. And then? I share witnessing 13 planes flying back and forth above us, farting out cloud plumes, filling the sky with trellis-like crisscross lines. “Look,” I plead, “that’s just not normal.” Instead, I am looked at as “just not normal.”  

Chemtrails, contrails, call them what you will. It’s confusing. Why one day, you see planes flying above and the trails dissipate immediately and then the next day, same clear kind of day, a bunch of planes fly above and emit trails of cloud condensation that last for days? Contrails, which are essentially just water vapour ice crystals, can only form at about 28,000 feet and at just the right humidity. Chemical trails, on the other hand, are dispersed from transport planes at around 10,000 and 12,000 feet. If a plane is flying at this elevation, there should be no contrails or any visible sign of water vapour. I’m not a scientist, but I do dabble in research. Go to the Planefinder site, enter Comox, BC and then zoom out and click on the planes that fly over our airspace that are modifying the weather. The culprits? Air Alaska predominately, followed by Air China, and even Fedex. 

It is not some conspiracy. It is true substances are released into the atmosphere from time to time for cloud seeding and experiments on controlling solar radiation. Both Russia and China have partnered on solar geoengineering or, the more palatable term, “solar radiation management” (SRM) for years. In fact, the Chinese government has been spending billions of dollars manipulating the weather for both agricultural and political reasons. They seeded clouds ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to reduce smog and rain ahead of the competition. Key political meetings held in the Chinese capital are notorious for enjoying beautiful clear skies, thanks to weather modification. At its 100th Chinese Communist Party celebration, weather authorities launched rockets carrying silver iodine into the sky for two-hours, resulting in artificial rain and less pollution.

And while other countries have also invested in cloud seeding, including the US, China’s enthusiasm for the technology has created some alarm, particularly in neighbouring India, where agriculture is heavily dependent on the monsoon, which has already been disrupted as a result of climate change. 

Just this April, the Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement project announced it is using specially built sprayers to shoot trillions of sea salt particles into the sky to increase the reflective capacity of marine clouds. The experiment, off the coast of Alameda, California, will run through the end of May. This follows the abrupt end of a Harvard University experiment last month that planned to inject reflective aerosols into the stratosphere near Sweden before it was cancelled after encountering opposition from Indigenous and environmental groups.

Several private individuals have started launching stratosphere-bound balloons without any given notice or prior announcement. Today in the US, anyone who wants to shoot aerosols into the sky simply needs to fill out a one-page form 10 days beforehand. In 2023, Make Sunsets, a venture-backed geoengineering startup, conducted two unauthorized launches that released sulfur dioxide in Mexico, which resulted in the Mexican government stating it would ban solar geoengineering. 

Almost all weather modification research is done with computer modelling, so no one knows exactly what might happen if it were done on a planetary scale. Studies show geoengineering not only weakens the ozone layer, alters precipitation patterns and affects agriculture, it also affects ecosystems, marine life and air quality. 

What seems more alarming is that sulfur dioxide pollution, for instance, is known to have serious health and environmental risks and is one of the six air pollutants regulated around the world. In the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide can combine with water vapour to form sulfuric acid, a major component of acid rain. Is “artificial rain” the new “acid rain”?  

“History has shown us that when we insert ourselves into modification of nature, there are always very serious unintended consequences,” said Greg Goldsmith, associate dean for research and development at Chapman University, who studies the implications of climate change on plant structure and function. “And therefore, it would be prudent to listen to what history has shown and look for consequences.”

We are all aware of climate change, biodiversity extinction, pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, and so on, yet we are simply unable to grasp how devastating their combined effects would be. These are more conversations that we should be having.

Playing god with the weather is not the answer. The side effects are many. As David Coulson wrote in Silent Earth, ‘it seems pretty clear that it is a bad idea but, like many human technologies that could have consequences for all of us, it is hard to regulate.” 

 In the meantime, as the Friendly Giant reminded us, “look up, look way up.”

THEY DON’T LIVE HERE ANY MORE

“Gimme shelter!” howled the Rolling Stones. But Keith Richards omitted the tagline: “That I can afford!” 

By December 2023, Hornby’s housing crisis had “reached a critical point,” Katherine Ronan reported. The island needed more housing for workers and their families “as quickly as possible if it is to survive as a community.”

HICEEC and Wellesley Consulting were “exploring the option of applying for a parcel of Crown Land” off Central Road, “extending from behind the Cemetery eastward to the Recycling Depot driveway,” she wrote. This central location within walking distance of key services was “optimal for affordable housing.” 

The same patch of planet had already attracted another consultant. While searching BC’s online Crown Land Registry database, Brian Gregg had come across File #1413862. Survey plans for Block L Section 11 near the old fire hall looked ideal for his client. Fittingly, the date of Gregg’s discovery — Dec, 7, 2020 — marked the anniversary of an attack on another vulnerable island by a foreign power bent on conquest. 

On August 17, 2022, Rogers Communications’ Crown Land Tenure Application #100396495 sought a Licence of Occupation for a freestanding 206-foot cell tower to be erected on 24 hectares of relinquished native land. The proposed industrial structure could be stretched another 40 feet without additional permits.

But there was a hitch. 

“Local governments have authority over land use by third parties on Crown Lands,” the Crown Lands webpage stipulates. “Independent, autonomous and accountable orders of government” — including the specifically named “Islands Trust” corporation — are “land use decision makers” authorized under the Local Government Act “to govern matters within their boundaries.” 

To go ahead, the Toronto-based telecom giant needed approval from Hornby’s Local Trust Committee. But our  LTC had already turned down a similar Telus application in 2017. To forestall an electoral uproar, complicit  corporate Trust planners “forgot” to reveal the Rogers tower proposal until after the October 2022 elections.

Ever since close to 500 Hornby Islanders either signed a “No Tower!” petition, or expressed their opposition during November ’22 calls from campaign organizers, local residents have been demanding an LTC vote of non-concurrence. 

When trustee Alex Allen made that motion on Sept. 8, 2023, he was instantly shut down by an off-island planner for improper procedure. But in a legal opinion by a barrister & solicitor specializing in Trust proceedings, Carla Conkin found that our LTC can turn down a tower application at any time. 

Allen has never demurred. 

Though he and Lasqueti’s tie-breaking Tim Peterson publicly oppose the tower, and trustee Grant Scott prefers an unspecified location outside Hornby’s centre, 19 months of LTC hand-writing could prove disastrous. 

In response to this reporter’s email, Peterson has revealed that during an April 26 confab with the province and the feds’ rebranded Industry Canada (ISED), Trust planners were informed that because the proposed cell tower site occupies Crown land, “there will be no request for concurrence from Rogers to the LTC.” 

Instead, with longstanding protocols broken and our local government shoved aside, Hornby’s trustees will only be allowed to “comment” on pending provincial approval.

Over Grant’s objections, Tim Peterson has called an as-yet-unscheduled Special public zoom meeting to formulate a response. Provincial box-checking could take from 8 to 30 days, unless an extension is granted. This “does not seem right”, Carla Conkin replied to my heads-up. But who will fund another legal opinion? 

A longtime resident spoke for many, saying, “We’re screwed.”

“Not yet,” I replied. What if we judo-flip ministerial interference to our advantage by using the #1 provincial priority against Rogers? 

Hasn’t the BC Government declared that its Land Use Operational Policy “applies to publicly oriented Crown land use by community groups and local governments for the purpose of providing a beneficial community service”? 

Doesn’t its shiny new Housing Supply Act require more populous municipalities to fast-track “rental housing” and “affordable housing”?

And wouldn’t rallying ‘round HICEEC to prioritize community housing over a redundant cell tower on the same patch of Crown Land be the best way forward? 

“There is plenty of space for housing or other uses,” Brian Gregg has argued, beneath a telecommunications tower constantly radiating powerful electromagnetic fields (EMF) within environmentally Protected Area IIA. But Section 59 of our Official Community Plan (OCP) stipulates: “For safety, no dwellings permitted within… a maximum of (3) times the height.”

Similar EMF concerns recently shot down cell towers proposed by Telus and Rogers in the Courtenay/Comox Agricultural Land Reserve — after PubMed and Environmental Health Trust documents submitted to the CVRD demonstrated clear harm to bees, birds and trees from “Rising Ambient EMF Levels in the Environment”. EHT’s National Institute of Health study cited nearly 1000 references.

“Radiofrequency radiation (RFR) from cell towers has not been proven safe for people, animals, birds, insects, and trees,” concurs the latest BioInitiative meta-study. “We now have ample evidence linking low intensity cumulative RFR exposure to DNA damage, cancer & tumors, mitochondrial damage, lowered sperm count and infertility, miscarriages, sleep disorders, memory and cognitive problems, headaches, migraines, damage to the blood-brain barrier, tinnitus, diabetes, heart palpitations, neurological disorders, and more.”

Children, elders and the immune-compromised are especially vulnerable. According to Canadian building biology experts, “No country’s RF guidelines provide less protection than Canada.” 

After strapping a cellphone to a plastic head for six minutes, industry-compromised Safety Code 6 continues to dismiss voluminous biological warnings. With zero environmental exposure limits, placing community housing beneath seven transmitters powerful enough to reach offshore (in violation of our OCP), would be like sending conscripted Ukrainians to the disintegrating front lines. 

Will HICEEC move quickly enough to preempt the Rogers application with its own? After lengthy procedural delays, Katherine Ronan says they intend to submit their community housing application “within the next couple of weeks.” 

Right now, concerned readers can write: Dave Peterson, Assistant Deputy Minister, Tenures, Competitiveness and Innovation (in charge of Crown Lands) at Dave.Peterson@gov.bc.ca. 

willthomasonline.net

EDITOR’S SOURCES: 

Email correspondence with Tim Peterson.  

Interviews with Katherine Ronan and “No Tower” campaign organizers Judith Walmsley and Christiane Brown. 

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/crown-land-water/crown-land/local-government

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/farming-natural-resources-and-industry/natural-resource-use/land-water-use/crown-land/community_inst.pdf

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/bc-government-housing-supply-act-10-cities-list

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/bc-municipalities-small-scale-multi-unit-homes-single-family-lots

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